


Bid the Snow Lift Our Burdens

by Alcyonidae



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Fluff, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:23:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5449871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alcyonidae/pseuds/Alcyonidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They sat together like this for a time, gathering in each others enjoyment, the snow helping to freeze away some of the burdens and sorrows that had attempted to grow in their bones. Even as the laughter subsided, they continued in companionable silence together; the faint snowflakes drifting around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was one of my first fanfics I wrote, unless you count those ones I wrote about Sonic the Hedgehog in middle school (please don't).
> 
> I purposefully wrote this to be ambiguous. I didn't want it to be a Garrus romance, because I haven't romanced him and wouldn't want to get it wrong. I also didn't want to make it a Kaidan romance so that you could enjoy it, too. Instead, I tried to write it where you could squint and read between the lines and see it as either.
> 
> This is set right after the end of ME1. Hope you enjoy!

It had been only 2 weeks since the battle of the Citadel and most of her crew were still nursing minor injuries. After Sovereign’s fall they had set out immediately into the ruined Citadel to help with the recovery mission. An uncounted amount of people had lost their lives, businesses, and homes during the attack. It was bleak volunteer work, but it had to be done. And if there was one thing Commander Shepard knew far too much about, it was the phrase “had to be done”.

After Shepard rejoined her allies, she had immediately set to combing the destructed areas for wounded and trapped civilians with them. Believing her to be trapped or even crushed beneath the wreckage of the fallen Reaper, the rescue medics had found and tended to her team first. It had taken many subtle glares from the tall, watchful Turian and many careful offers from her trusted, loyal Lieutenant before she had even been willing to stop amid the wreckage of the Citadel and let them tend to her wounds.

She could have simply retreated back to her ship or basked in the attention that her rescue mission was beginning to afford her, but recovering survivors and using her presence to give people hope took precedence for her. It had to be done.

Commander Shepard sat down on a pile of rubble, wincing as she looked over her armor. She wasn’t quite sure what had broken her arm, whether it was part of the building or part of the Reaper itself, but she was thankful it didn’t seem to be that bad. She she did her best to wipe off her right eye with the gloved side of her armored hand once more. There was a rather nasty gash above her eyebrow that had been letting a trickle of blood down run into her eye. She assumed the wound looked as bad as it felt. The damage had been enough to earn a startled stare from her usually stalwart Turian companion. He wasn’t very familiar with human physiology and had assumed she was two steps from death. Shepard was quick to reassure him that head wounds just bled a lot and she would be fine.

Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko crouched beside her and began unclasping the armor plates on her injured arm before setting them aside carefully. He had taken notice of her almost protective reverence for the hard earned N7 armor. He wasn’t sure if it was some sort of superstition or self-reminder of what she could accomplish when needed, but he paid the specialized armor the same respect that he had watched her care for it with.  
She allowed herself to openly sigh as he began to gingerly prod the wounded arm. It wasn’t the pain she was worried about. She had broken enough bones to almost become immune to the feeling and she knew Alenko was more than patient and skilled enough to fix the injury without causing her more discomfort.

This is going to be an inconvenience, thought Shepard, finally giving words to what she was feeling. It would take days for leadership to regroup enough to give them new orders. Her crew could easily sit back and tend to their wounds while they waited. And though Shepard had seen more than her fair share of the death and maiming of soldiers, she was deeply discomforted by the suffering of civilians. Had there been any better way to win without so much collateral damage?

She bit her lip at the thought. Alenko snapped his head up to look at her and froze, thinking he had mistakenly applied too much pressure as he was resetting the broken ulna in her arm. She gave him a slight shake of her head, the unspoken communication enough to reassure him.

“Do you think it’ll ever be the same?”

The question rumbled from the deep voice of the Turian standing in front of them, breaking her out of her thoughts. Shepard looked up to watch him for a moment. Garrus Vakarian’s back was to them, but turned just slightly to the side as his gaze roamed purposefully over the remnants of the once beautiful gardens and waterways of the Citadel. His beloved Mantis sniper rifle was still cradled expertly in his hands. He reminded her of an eagle scanning the fields for some unfortunate field mouse he’d soon swoop in on and crush with his talons. She decided not to share this image with him. “Turians are nothing like your Earth birds, Shepard.” he’d admonished her about it once before.

Shepard gazed over the debris that currently made up the once beautiful Citadel and at all the people trying to pull their lives back together before answering him.

“Probably not, Garrus,” she responded to the shoulder he’d turned their way, the only indication he was still listening and not waiting for more enemies to pop up and gun them down in their one moment of reprieve. “But they’ll rebuild anyway.”

They had spent those two weeks at a grueling pace, the entire crew carefully combing the rubble for survivors, organizing supplies, and setting up makeshift shelters for the families that had lost their homes in the attack. Shepard now stood in the cargo bay of the Normandy SR-1, surrounded by that same crew.

They looked awful, to put it simply. Her eyes drifted over each one to take in their current state, trying to assess how much they had left.

She started at her XO Pressley. While she was out overturning rocks, he had borne the burdens of leadership on the ship itself. Pressley would never admit it and Shepard would never bring it up, but he was probably one of the oldest officers on the ship. He was most likely very close to retirement. He had served under countless captains and seen many battles. To most, he looked as composed and in charge as he always was, but Shepard noticed a tenseness in his shoulders that had not always been there.

Shepard glanced next to Alenko. His left arm was bathed in the orange glow of his omni-tool. He was tapping away at it busily. She watched him pause for a moment and scrub the back of his hand over his forehead. His eyes were dark and tired. How many migraines had he willingly suffered to help move the fragments of Reaper and building? Her teeth clenched for a moment, anger at herself flaring briefly. She had let him push himself too far.

Garrus was leaning back against a control panel, separated a bit from the rest of the group. His arms were crossed over his armor, talons resting on his arms. The pose was meant to give off an air of ease, but Shepard could see his eyes flickering around the cargo bay now and then. Was he seeing possible places for enemies to hide or possible places for bodies to be buried? She knew he’d seen one too many of his own people crushed under the same rocks she’d found her own.

Tali was seated on one of the supply crates. She was bent forward so her elbows rested on her knees, her hands clasped between them. It was impossible to tell what she was feeling with her face covered by a suit, but Shepard knew the Quarian was not one to sit motionless for such a length of time. It had been too dangerous for Tali to participate in the endeavor to recover bodies from the wreckage. There was too much risk of her suit becoming punctured by some errant sharp building material, so she had spent much of her time assisting the various provisional hospitals.

As she felt the Normandy touch down onto the planet, Shepard stepped forward into the middle of the cargo bay. She drew strength from the repaired armor that felt more comfortable to her than a favorite t-shirt and felt more like a uniform than anything the Alliance had ever given her.

Her crew quickly set aside their brooding and assembled themselves closer to her. Shepard lifted her chin and slipped easily into Commander Shepard mode.

“Alright. I want this to go quickly and smoothly. We’re just picking up supplies from the colony to bring back to the Citadel. Nothing fancy.” She looked over each of her crew members briefly before adding, “Unlike most of our missions, this most likely won’t be a trap.”

“Shepard. I can’t help but feel like this is busy work for us. We’re a warship, not a freighter.”

She nodded at Garrus. It was a bold statement to make to a commanding officer and there were few on her crew that would have so easily voiced it. Garrus was definitely one of those few. She wondered if he knew that or if this was just his Turian way of doing things. If anyone else had made the statement, Shepard might have brushed it off with some platitude, but from Garrus she would give him the benefit of sharing her own mirrored thoughts.

“I’ve thought exactly the same thing. But right now, we’re a threat.”

“A threat?” Alenko seemed to snap out of his pensiveness. “Commander, I know we had to make the choice of destroying Sovereign over saving the council, but that hardly seems enough to make us a threat. You could have nominated yourself Warlord and everyone would have agreed to it.”

Shepard was momentarily thankful of his usage of “we made the difficult choice” instead of the blame that she knew would soon lay squarely at her own feet.

“I think that’s exactly why we’re being sent away from the Citadel on this kind of busy work. We rightfully went against their decision, mutinied, stole an advanced warship, and saved the day in style. I think they’re worried about the grudges we might have and the demands we might make once we realize we have them.”

She tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ear as she continued, “They know it’s safest to keep us out of the spotlight right now. Too much media coverage would lift us even further onto pedestals and give us more leverage than they could ever fight against.”

There was no response to her statement. Everyone had seemed to decide their shoes were the most interesting part of the cargo bay to look at. Well, that certainly helped lift spirits, Shepard thought ruefully as she slammed her hand onto the large red button beside the cargo bay door. Red lights flashed and familiar klaxons screeched in their ears as the large pressure door began to lower itself into a ramp out onto the snowy planet.

Shepard immediately made her way down the ramp into the snow, fully armored boots loudly announcing her arrival, not bothering to stick around to listen to the inevitable quip from Garrus about the snow. Someday she’d visit Palaven and judge his perfect weather for herself.

She allowed herself a brief smirk at the thought of Garrus’ three toed boots sinking immediately into the snow while her own carried her with relative ease across the buildup. They had landed near what looked to be a loading dock outside of a rather impressive grouping of buildings. Unfortunately, the loading dock was all but lost under the heavy pile up from the previous blizzards. There were various supply crates arranged in the snow, some of them almost buried underneath it. Shepard figured that the colonists had most likely carried out the crates the night before, and a storm had blown threw afterward, nearly burying them from view.

Shepard stopped as she reached a small open area amidst the arrangement of supply crates and barrels. She could hear her team clanking down the metal walkway from the ship and then crunching into the snow behind her. Pressley would stay aboard the ship to help organize the materials as they came on board, but Alenko, Garrus, and Tali would be helping her catalog and load the stock back onto the ship.

Garrus was right. They were a warship, not a freighter.

Shepard silently surveyed the snowy inventory they would be bringing aboard with an unhappy quirk of her lips.


	2. Chapter 2

If it hadn’t been for Garrus’ strict military upbringing, he would have thrown his hands into the air and cursed whatever spirit was in charge of snow. Garrus was a seasoned traveler. He’d seen planets with acid filled lakes, toxic atmospheres, putrid fog, and slobbering predators. But snow… snow was on the top of his list of things to avoid. Right up there with eating human food or having his gun jam in the middle of a firefight.

“I’d like to see data on the number of frozen lifeless planets versus wonderful warm planets in the known galaxy. From what I’ve seen, the former far outweigh the latter.” he commented dryly to no one in particular.

Garrus’ Turian boots clicked loudly on the ramp as he descended down onto the planet, Tali and Alenko following alongside him. The landing area was modest in size and lay in the shadow of a massive complex of buildings that housed the colonists from the unpleasant blizzards that characterized this particular planet.

The supply boxes were alone aside from the snow drifts nuzzled up next to them. The colonists were probably bunkering down for another storm predicted to roll in later that evening. His mind flashed to the colonists laughing and sipping hot drinks inside of their warm pre-fab buildings. The thought made him wistfully wonder if they’d invite a Turian in to join them.

He struggled through the buildup of snow until he neared the largest grouping of provisions and brought the datapad in his hand up to examine. Alenko knelt beside the crates, waving his omni-tool over each one in turn, sometimes having to stop and use his other arm to knock off a layer of snow in order to scan the information coded on the sides of each crate. Tali busied herself by doing the same to another group nearby.

Garrus glanced with exasperation at his shoulder and quickly brushed off the friendly dusting of snowflakes that were beginning to accumulate on his armor. He then turned his attention back to the information beginning to fill up his datapad, his mandibles twitching in irritation at the numbers.

“Shepard, this isn’t going to work. There just isn’t enough space in the cargo bay to hold all of these materials. Even if we stacked them beyond regulations and left no walkway in between.” He tapped a taloned digit at the datapads screen as if to highlight an important piece of information. “If we want to fit all of this on the Normandy, we’ll have to sleep on crates of protein bars.”

Tali glanced up from her omni-tool to help. “With the Mako under repairs at the Citadel we should have a little more room in the cargo bay.” Her statement ended in what almost sounded like a question, as if she was concerned about frustrating the Turian any further.

Garrus shook his head quickly, he would be pacing back and forth if it wasn’t for the snow creeping up his ankles and settling on his shoulders.

“Shepard, did anyone at the Citadel even think to look at these numbers? They have access to the Normandy specs, this just seems negligent, even for Citadel bureaucracy.” Garrus stared at the datapad again, tapping out a few quick calculations in the stillness of the lightly falling snow.

He paused after a moment and glanced up from the figures on the report. He realized his question had been met with silence. It was unlike Shepard to outright ignore a question, even if it was one that was slightly rhetorical and somewhat embittered. Garrus looked up from the datapad and glanced over his shoulder.

Alenko also picked up the sudden silence and followed Garrus’ gaze, then suddenly stood when he noticed it was only the three of them amid the supply crates.

“Commander?” Alenko called out into the flurries of snow, his voice carefully controlled as he dismissed his omni-tool with a thoughtless wave of his hand. His posture was tense and his eyes flashed over the loading dock. “Shepard?”

Garrus glanced at him quickly, the datapad forgotten in his hand. The earlier comment about this mission hopefully not being a trap flashed ironically through his mind. “Did you see her when we came down here?” he asked briskly.

Alenko wasn’t looking at the Turian. He was still scouring the snowy landing area, a look of alarm painting his normally controlled emotions. “Now that you mention it… I don’t think I did.”

Tali abruptly made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a squawk. Garrus and Alenko spun around hastily to face her, hands already reaching for weapons. A glop of snow clung to the front of Tali’s purple mask; she scrabbled frantically to scrape it off. They could hear her gasping in what sounded like shocked disbelief. The snow had not hit hard enough to damage her visor, but had been enough to startle and slightly knock her back.

Garrus took a step towards Tali, his hand outstretched in bewilderment. His mind worked frantically. He was out of his element. He was by no means an expert in this weather, but he was pretty sure snow didn’t work in this manner. It fell from the sky in miniature form.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Alenko for help. He had a faint recollection of the human mentioning that his birth place often experienced snowfall.

Garrus drew in a short, sharp breath as his gaze fell to the human. Alenko’s demeanor had changed. His expression had transformed from puzzled confusion to decisive determination. He backed away from Garrus slowly, his eyes still fixed on the wintery surroundings, and then swiftly crouched into cover behind one of the supply crates with effortless ease.

Garrus tensed. He was keenly attuned to the ebb and flow of combat, especially when it came to the members of this shore party. He was unnerved that Alenko had sensed enemies while he remained out in the open with his mouth hanging agape.

What’s going on…


	3. Chapter 3

Shepard was crouched behind a crowd of chest-high crates. She kept herself perfectly still, knowing that her slightest movement would give away her location due to the crunch of pristine snow beneath her boots. She peeked between two of the boxes, watching her targets like the predator she had trained so hard to become, relying on what years of arduous missions had tempered into unthinking instinct.

Though she sat idle, she kept her muscles tense and at the ready. There was no way to know when she would need to spring from cover or fall back to a safer location. Her breath appeared in the icy vapor of the frozen planet's atmosphere, chilled into calm wisps.

She could, as she had many times in the past, wait behind cover for hours until the ideal conditions were met. She prayed it wouldn’t come to that. Her armor was able to fully regulate her body temperature, but the affable little snowflakes that had fallen into her hair were starting to melt. The wintery moisture plastered the locks to her forehead and caused them to drip into her eyes.

She was also acutely aware of the time that was needed to complete their mission and return the much needed resources back to the survivors of the Citadel attack.

Shepard needed to be careful. Her enemies outnumbered her and could easily overwhelm her with strength if she let them. She spared a moment to check her surroundings for any potential threats before peering again through the little sliver of space that the two crates afforded her. Being flanked would quickly end her mission.

Shepard fell easily into her comfortable tactical assessment mode, an action that came to her without thought or will. Her adversaries were almost making this too easy. She calmly spotted one that had drifted away from the rest of the group. There would be her start.

Shepard reached down beside her where her ammunition lay. She hefted the frigid sphere in her hand a moment, gauging the weight and the distance to her target. Shepard was a remarkable sharpshooter. Give her almost any gun and she could not only make it work, but make it waltz. Sliding from cover with a shotgun to close range? Easy. Picking off moving targets with a heavy pistol? Simple. 800m to her mark with a sniper rifle before lunch time? Effortless.

This particular armament was no different. Shepard took a calming breath and then launched the deliberately formed snowball at the Quarian’s mask. It sailed in a lazy arc across the snowfield and then splattered like so much icey shrapnel as it met its destination.

An easy grin blossomed across her lips as she heard Tali sputter and curse over the comm. Tali usually reserved that kind of language for malfunctioning machines and other hardware that might eventually break and bring about their untimely death in the blackness of space. Who knew one carefully aimed snowball could have that same effect?

While she herself had never made a snowball on the farming colony on which she was raised, Shepard surmised that the skill was at least hidden away somewhere deep in her DNA, as if millions of human ancestors had stored away these basic skills just in case. The Quarians, on the other hand, had no such buried information on winter warfare stored away from their arid planet or their temporary metallic home.

Shepard ducked back into cover fluidly, watching again through the void between the group of supply crates that served as her protection. Tali would most likely not be a further threat. She was still lamenting an induction port now clogged with snow.

Movement caught her attention and she narrowed her eyes at its source. Kaidan Alenko would be her greatest danger. He had grown up in Canada on Earth. From what she could remember from her grade school geography classes, it often snowed there. She gave herself a brief moment to hope she hadn’t gotten in over her head. The man was a patient, competent soldier, and that look in his eyes read like a Krogan that had just seen a Volus enter a bar fight.

Her moment of slight regret ended when Alenko tucked himself away into similar cover, leaving Garrus abandoned on the battlefield. Shepard allowed herself a brief moment in the safety of her hiding spot to grin at the normally capable Turian that stood gawking at the skirmish unfolding before him. The way Garrus had carried on about the snow and cold on Noveria assured Shepard that the Turian would be one less to worry about in this particular battle. Give him Krogan, Cerberus, or Geth, and Garrus was a crucial asset to the skirmish. Give him a little frozen water, some teammates acting abnormally, and suddenly he was disoriented.

Shepard’s expression quickly pulled itself back into a controlled mask, and her self-satisfied musings abruptly ended as Alenko stepped back into view. She snagged a waiting snowball hastily, letting the muscle-memory of her instincts take over.

Stepping out of cover first? Quite unlike him. Alenko must think fairly highly of his skills.

Shepard leapt up from cover, fully intending to catch him before he could get any closer, or worse, find a way to flank her. She froze as she rose up to her full height, arm already wound back to loft the snowball in his direction. She fully expected to find him in a mirrored pose. She fully expected to be faster and more confident than him. She hadn’t expected him to not be holding any snow.

Instead, his eyes narrowed dangerously as the air around him took on a faint glimmer of blue. He raised an arm slowly, almost tauntingly, in a very familiar mnemonic gesture Shepard had seen him do countless times before. Her eyes widened in realization before she wisely and frantically threw herself down again, her frozen ammunition abandoned. She pressed her back to the crate and threw her hands up over her head with what might have sounded like a squeak to anyone crazy enough to say that Commander Shepard, Survivor of Akuze, Hero of the Battle of the Citadel had actually made such a noise.

An enormous wave of snow cascaded over her as Alenko used his biotics to send an avalanche over her protective barricade. She grit her teeth as some of the snow melted on her temperature-regulated armor and ran into the spaces between the defensive plates. She swiftly shook her head to dislodge as much of the snow from her hair as she could before it could melt and cause more problems.

“Cheater!” she declared over her shoulder as a particularly icy rivulet of water ran down the middle of her back.

“You did start it, you know.” She could hear him chuckling lightly, quite pleased with himself, not too far behind her.

Her lips tightened into a line and she narrowed her eyes. He hadn’t bothered to get back into cover, and his continuing laughter was all the information she needed. Shepard scooped up another snowball and, in one swift motion, popped up from cover and lobbed it right into Alenko’s face.

He looked stunned for a moment. His eyes blinking the snow away while the rest clung to him like a mask. He then fell back into the snow with a theatrical grasping of his chest. Alenko raised one arm in the air as if it took him all the effort in the world and dramatically announced, “Thus ends the brief life of Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko who was cruelly betrayed by the Commander he so faithfully served.” He then let the arm drop bonelessly back into the snow.

Shepard spared him a brief appreciation of his dramatic performance before she was on the move. It wouldn’t take long now for Garrus to get himself together and either start defending himself or start berating her for not taking him somewhere nice again.

She would need to think bigger for the Turian. One snowball wouldn’t take him down as it had the others. A brief image of him lifting her like a child and tossing her into a rather large snow drift flickered in her mind, and she shook her head to clear it.

Garrus was luckily still disoriented. He had moved a bit closer to Alenko as if he was unsure if the human was really hurt or not. The melodramatic air of Alenko’s last words and his convincing commitment to play dead had thrown the Turian from his index of normal human behavior.

Shepard used this momentary distraction to her advantage. She crept along behind the various supplies until his back was fully facing her. The Turian was maybe a foot taller and, in his armor, vastly outweighed her. He also had longer arms and intimidating talon-like fingers she didn’t want to find herself on the wrong end of.

She stepped back a few feet as slowly and silently as she could, her body still slightly crouched to help maintain cover. There were a few stacked supply crates separating her from Garrus. She steadied herself a moment, taking a breath before launching herself forward at a hard run. Shepard crossed the few feet to the crates in seconds, her automated armor helping to propel herself ahead like a sprinter. As she reached the stacks of supplies, she used them like steps to gain a height advantage against her Turian target. At the peak of the little mountain that the supply crates had created, she leapt with her best warrior cry, throwing herself onto Garrus’ armored back, her arms outstretched to catch him around the shoulders.

Shepard had purposely aimed her jump to hit him off center, causing him to be wrenched somewhat to the right and throwing him off balance. He staggered slightly with a surprised grunt and fell forward into the snow.

Shepard knew she didn’t have long before the Turian would either reach back and grab her or easily shake her off. She quickly let go of him and knelt on his armored back, using her weight to hopefully pin him down in the snow for a few more precious seconds. She swiftly leaned forward and, using the length of her arms, began to scoop heaps of snow over his head.

Garrus barked in surprise. The shout sounded far too much like a roar, as far as Shepard was concerned, and she quickly vaulted from his back, moving safely out of his reach.

As soon as Shepard had leapt from his back, Garrus bolted upright with some unintelligible noise that Shepard guessed was some sort of foul Turian curse that the translator didn’t have the fortitude to decipher.  
He shook his head hard to clear the snow away, but the high neck of his armor had created a sort of bowl that held the snow all the way up to his chin, completely covering his mandibles that were no doubt twitching with intense irritation.

“Shepard!” he yelled with so much exasperation that she could no longer control herself. The image of Garrus sitting there with that basin of snow melting and creeping its way down into his armor, along with the intense displeasure in his voice, caused her to double over, hands on her knees, laughter erupting loudly and unbidden.

Any remote amount of annoyance or anger quickly disappeared from the Turian and was replaced instead by curious bewilderment. Alenko sat up from his acting and also glanced over at the sound. Even Tali interrupted her attempts to remove every last trace of snow from her suit and stared.

There were a few times when their Commander Shepard had smiled; at a friend, to sooth some terrified civilian, to allay the fears of a nervous ally. And there were a few times when their Commander Shepard had laughed; at one of Joker’s quips, after Wrex had broken a chair he had sat in, during a Hannar soap opera she occasionally indulged in (for the laughs, she assured them). But this sort of uncontrolled, uproarious laughter was something none of them had ever witnessed from her. And there was an unspoken tone continually around Shepard, most people might never pick up on, that said this was probably a scarce occurrence.

Shepard started to lift a hand to gesture at Garrus and make a comment, but neither action was completed as more resounding laughter bubbled from her lips instead. She let herself collapse into the snow, arms crossed across her stomach, laughing so hard that she could barely afford to draw in a few ragged breaths.

Alenko glanced between the Turian and his Commander, a slow grin had already been creeping onto his lips, but was now replaced by a similar brook of laughter. He too had to brace himself with an arm over his stomach as the mirth threatened to topple him into the snow again.

Tali stared at Garrus a moment longer. Her expression entirely unreadable behind the mask of her suit. She then fixed her gaze briefly on Shepard, and then Alenko, before her own lively laughter joined them, somehow even more raucous than the Commander’s seemingly uncontrollable levity. The light on her mask flickered continuously as she brought up a three fingered hand to point, not at Garrus, but at the Commander doubled over in the snow and wracked with giggles.

Garrus brushed the snow from the shoulders of his armor carefully as if he hadn’t noticed that his three companions were currently so senseless with laughter that they could scarcely breathe. He then fixed a pointed stare at Shepard and dipped his hands into the snow, slowly and deliberately forming a flawless snowball between them. His eyes never left Shepard’s shaking form. Her shoulders were hunched forward as she tried to catch her breath, her eyes full of cheerful tears that clung to her lashes.

He held the snowball up in his palm a moment, as if he were inspecting its perfection. It was an impeccable specimen, especially for a Turian who had undoubtedly never crafted one. His eyes drifted back to Shepard as he cracked a predatory Turian version of a grin and stated dryly, “You know, it figures humans would figure out a way to use a cluster of frozen water molecules as a weapon. Then again, as a Turian, I'm one to talk.”

The infectious giggling of her companions had successfully served to pin Shepard in place. She had no ability to pull herself out of her revelry nor duck out of the way of Garrus’ snowball as it hit her squarely in the forehead. The additional bite of frost on her skin in no way dampened her spirit and only served to make her throw back her head in even more roaring laughter.

Garrus scanned the scene before him. Shepard was still collapsed in the snow, trying and totally unable to catch her breath. She had attempted to use an armored forearm to brush away the snow he had thrown at her forehead, but had only succeeded in brushing it back into her hair. The crystalline flakes still clung to the strands and glittered in the muted sunlight.

Alenko and Tali had only spared a moment in their amusement to take in this new sight of their commander being blasted with a snowball to the forehead. Unfortunately, this image only served to make their peels of laughter even more unruly and boisterous.

The grin that had been fixed on Garrus’ face finally broke, the deep timbre of his laughter joining with the rowdy harmony of his comrades. One heavily armored hand clutched at his chest. He abandoned any further attempts at clearing the snow from his armor and deserted any remaining vestiges of propriety. There were no aliens or languages or differences left among them.

They sat together like this for a time, gathering in each others enjoyment, the snow helping to freeze away some of the burdens and sorrows that had attempted to grow in their bones. Even as the laughter subsided, they continued in companionable silence together; the faint snowflakes drifting around them.

Shepard leaned back into the snow and stared up into the sky, her eyes unconsciously seeking her cherished stars shrouded behind the billowy grey clouds. She blinked as the little flakes of snow fell into her eyes, but otherwise didn’t look away from her inquiry. She watched for a while, her cheeks slightly pink from the cold, not hearing the last chuckles fade from her friends. She might have remained there until she froze. A younger Shepard had spent an uncounted number of chilly nights in that same pose, much to her mother’s dismay.

It wasn’t until Alenko stepped into her gaze that her abstraction ended, his hand outstretched to her. She looked up at him, regarding the man that had been by her side since the beginning of this misadventure, before fixing him with a warm smile. She reached out to clasp his hand and allowed him to easily pull her onto her feet.

Shepard turned next to Garrus and offered her hand to him. She dug her feet into the snow to help him stand as he grasped her forearm. Some of the snow still stubbornly clinging to his armor fluttered to the ground in the movement as she helped him stand. He reached out to pat her shoulder affectionately, smoothing away any concern that he might have taken her hijinks personally. She responded with that fond smile again, the one that was so rarely seen even by those closest to her.

They all knew this brief respite had not succeeded in melting away the entirety of the mental weight that hung in the air above their shoulders. They would return to the Citadel, to the broken and lost people. They would continue their mission, with superiors eroding their stature, and new obstacles hindering their intentions. But this momentary binding would solidify their resolve and give them the fortitude to trudge forward.

Shepard flashed her companions an infectious grin before activating her omni-tool and leading them back to the task that had brought them to this planet in the first place.

“We really should get back to work before Pressley buries us here.”


End file.
